FLIGHT, 13 January 1961 65
AIR COMMERCE
Delivered to Pakistan International Airlines at Schiphol on
January 3 was the first of five Fokker Friendships for this operator.
Four will be 40-seat airliners and one a Freightship with the large
cargo door. Passenger services will be inaugurated on January 23
GHANA'S STATUS SYMBOL
THOUGH Ghana Airways is still a BOAC associate, withBOAC Associated Companies holding 40 per cent of the
£400,000 nominal capital, the seven-year agreement signedbetween the two airlines in July 1958 is being revised. Soon the
airline will not be a BOAC associate. This is a reflection ofDr Nkrumah's desire for the minimum of foreign influence in
Ghana's affairs, and of his regard for the nation's airline as asymbol of Ghana's national adulthood.
Ghana gave notice a year ago (Flight, January 22, 1960) thatshe intended to buy out BOAC Associated Companies' 40 per
cent interest, and the corporation agreed to revise the contractaccordingly. No date has been fixed for the actual transfer, and
for the time being Sir Duncan Cumming and Mr DesmondBungay remain as BOAC's representatives on the board.
The revenue pool between BOAC and Ghana Airways on theUK - Ghana route has also been revised, taking into account the
fact that Ghana Airways now owns (rather than charters fromBOAC) Britannias. It is understood that though the operation
of these two aircraft is by BOAC crews, these are under contractto Bristol in accordance with the terms of the contract between
Ghana Airways and Bristol.
BOAC have 12 staff seconded to Ghana Airways under theseven-year agreement, and there appears to be no intention on
the part of Ghana to rescind this part of the contract. BOAChave the following staff in Accra: Mr L. C. Giles, acting general
manager; Mr J. W. S. Gregson, station manager Accra; MessrsK. G. A. Bond and J. W. Seares, accountants; Mr B. Thomsett,
reservations superintendent; Mr F. Ives, reservations officer;Mr R. F. Muir, sales superintendent; Mr G. H. Langtrey, senior
station officer; Mr J. S. Burley, station officer; and Mr L. Stevens,engineer. All these staff are on one- or two-year tours, and
presumably they will continue at their posts, or be interchangeablewith other BOAC staff, for the full term of the BOAC - Ghana
Airways agreement. Two others are based in London.Meanwhile BOAC, also in accord with the agreement, are train-
ing Ghanaians to complete the "Ghanaization" of the airline(Flight, March 4, 1960, page 322). There are at the present time
no fewer than 70 Ghana Airways people in the UK under BOACtraining or taking courses elsewhere, and a further 30 are expected
during the next few months—the eventual total, it is believed,being likely to rise to 112. These trainees include all Ghana
Airways senior management and executives, such as the prospec-tive general manager, chief pilot, chief engineer, chief accountant,
and so on.
A recent article in Aviation Week attributes to Ghana officialsthe admission that Ghana Airways "is not a commercial operation
and isn't trying to be one," and that the idea is to make GhanaAirways the dominant carrier of an independent Africa. Accord-
ing to this American source, "BOAC officials who run the airlineunder a management contract maintain a pained silence when
questioned on how the carrier [which has bought Britannias,Il-18s, Viscounts and is shopping for 707s or VClOsJ plans to
operate a fleet of aircraft flown by British and Russian pilots andmaintained in London and Moscow." It notes that BOAC manage-
ment personnel "find themselves committed to run an airlinewhose important equipment and route decisions [including the
decision to buy Il-18s, which are Soviet-crewed and maintained]are often made without their knowledge. And if the whole costly
operation collapses some day, it is only natural to expect theGhana Government to put the blame on the BOAC management."
Last week a BOAC spokesman declined, naturally enough, tocomment on these statements. But it is believed that BOAC have
in fact warned the Ghana Government of the financial con-sequences of the prestige policies being pursued. BOAC will soon
have no financial stake in Ghana Airways, which in any case hasalways had its losses under-written by the Ghana Government,
but the corporation finds itself shouldering more than a merecontractual obligation to make Ghana Airways a success.
BLACK BOX BOOKING BY BEA
•"THE ideal airline reservations system should (1) give a quick-*• answer to all booking inquiries; (2) avoid overbooking and
underbooking, and hence achieve the optimum load factor oneach flight; (3) keep an accurate record of the source and scale
of demand; and (4) keep a check on bookings so that the trafficdepartment can be kept in the picture.
Going are the days in most big airlines when haphazard "stop-sale" messages are sent out to reservations centres. And going
too are the days when, at widely distributed booking points, allticket-sales are entered on slips and big boards are manually
adjusted to show clerks which flights are full or open. Even theimprovement on this method—the replacement of slips and boards
by sheets stuck on big rotating drums (or moving belts) withclerks sitting around them—is being quickly outdated by rising
traffic; there are limits to the expansion of sight boards, if onlybecause of the eyesight limitations of booking clerks, some of
whom are finding that they need binoculars to read the sightboards.
Nowadays the booking of airline tickets by a big airline—thatis to say one carrying three or four million passengers a year—must
be as automatic as possible. A system is needed whereby thetelephonist-clerk, on receiving an enquiry, can just slip a key-
coded card into a box which interrogates a computer which inturn replies with lights to say whether the flight concerned is
open or full. American Airlines have had such a machine, knownas the Reservisor, for ten years, and a "sophisticated" develop-
ment for four years. It works day and night non-stop for monthson end, and it is known as "fully integrated electronic booking."
Now BEA, who in 1960 carried 3,860,000 passengers, are tobuv such a computer (though they decline to say from whom).
It is to be installed at their Cromwell Road air terminal in 1963at a cost of about £2m for the computer plus a further £2m
for the complete system. This seems expensive; but if thesystem manages to raise BEA's load factor for a given standard of
sen/ice by only one per cent, it will (on our estimate anyway)have paid for itself at BEA's rate of earning revenue in four or
five years—by about 1967 or 1968.
One of the few occasions on which the chairmen of the two airways
corporations have been seen together in public was at the National
College of Air Training at Hamble last week. On the left is Capt
J. W. G. James, flight operations director of BEA. A note about the
occasion is on page 69